Tuesday, March 22, 2011

What Did I Expect? It Was a Novel Called "Freedom," After All

I'm listening to Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom on CD lately...and, well, as I type this I realize that I just have to stop listening to it. Mindless DJ bullshit chatter and tunes with commercials or random right wing talk nonsense is just as good as spending time on Freedom. But if I persist with the novel, I get to have that stupid fantasy that it might get better. The really dumbass thing is that I already did that with a Richard Russo novel called Bridge of Sighs, and it Never. Got. Better. Part of it is the reader's fault--the way he reads everything in a sarcastic and/or pissed off tone is grating in the extreme. But really he wuz prolly just going with what he thought (rightly) wuz Franzen's sarcastic and/or pissed off tone.

Now, tho', at long last, I really do want to meet Oprah. I want to axe her, "What THE FUCK? How is this one of your book club picks? Did you ever consider telling people that they should avoid certain books? If so...dear God, woman...why wouldn't you tell them to never ever fucking read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom?" But here we are in the Twilight Zone of literature: not only is the book not reviled, but people are told to read it by many book reviewers and it wuz put on best of the year lists for 2010...and it's even mentioned reverently as the possible new Great American Novel.

I give up on "serious" novels. "Serious" is apparently code for boring as fuck.